Trains Collide On Viaduct: Four Lives Lost; 50 People Hurt

Wanganui Chronicle, 2 December 1948, Page 5

Trains Collide On Viaduct: Four Lives Lost; 50 People Hurt

LONDON. Dec 1 (Recd 6 pm).— Thick fog hampered rescue operations following the collision of two trains on a viaduct at Stockport, Cheshire, in which four were killed and 50 injured. Of the injured 21 were admitted to hospital. When they heard the terrific crash the station staff stumbled down the line in visibility of only a few yards to the viaduct, which is iust outside Stockport station. Flares and arc lamps were quickly rigged around the crashed coaches from which cries for help were coming, while water and morphia were brought by ambulance men and doctors, stretcher parties were organised to carry the injured back along the line to the station.

A general alarm was sounded and all available police ambulances and railwaymen were called out to the viaduct. The Stockport Infirmary prepared an emergency ward for casualties. Ambulances had to travel at a crawling pace to the viaduct and

back to the hospital with the injured because of the thickness of the fog. Three hours after the crash the injured were still arriving in ambulances at Stockoort Infirmary. Emergency operations were performed in a number of cases. There were hundreds of passengers in the two trains, which were crowded to capacity and it was lucky that neither crashed over the side of the viaduct a.fter the impact. Many are believed to have been injured in failing from doors to the viaduct track in the darkness and fog. Rescue workers, armed with axes and crowbars, worked for half-an-hour in swirling fog to release tv.o women and a man trapped in the telescoped front carriage of one of two passenger trains which collided 15 miles south of Birmingham. One of the passengers said: "The train, stopped as though it had hit a bride wall. There was terrific confusion in the fog and darkness.”